The Cooking Gene

A James Beard Award–winning memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture tracing one man's ancestry through food, from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom.

"Slavery made the world of our ancestors incredibly remote to us. Thankfully the work of Michael W. Twitty helps restore our awareness of their struggle and successes bite by bite, giving us a true taste of the past." —Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of PBS's Finding Your Roots and Many Rivers to Cross

Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touchpoints in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine.

Twitty travels from the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields to tell of the struggles his family faced and how food enabled his ancestors' survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and visits Civil War battlefields in Virginia, synagogues in Alabama, and black-owned organic farms in Georgia.

As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the South's past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power of food to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together.

"Should there ever be a competition to determine the most interesting man in the world, Michael W. Twitty would have to be considered a serious contender." —Washington Post

"Twitty ably joins past and present, puzzling out culinary mysteries along the way. . . . An exemplary, inviting exploration and an inspiration for cooks and genealogists alike." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)